


Given Away

by Anti_kate



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Flaming swords, M/M, No betas we live and die like men, War in Heaven (Good Omens), Whumptober, a soupçon of pining, but not really, not much violence really
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-02
Updated: 2019-10-02
Packaged: 2020-11-15 11:41:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20865632
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anti_kate/pseuds/Anti_kate
Summary: It’s not his place to ask. It’s ineffable. It’s his job to guard, flaming sword gripped firmly in a hand that doesn’t shake.





	Given Away

The first time he is given the sword, his hand shakes so much he drops it instantly. It clatters onto the cold tiles of heaven’s pristine floors.

  
Gabriel sneers at him, but that’s nothing new, and pushes the sword back with the toe of one bare foot. (No-one has invented shoes yet.)

  
He picks it up and the flames leap up its celestial silver length. The fire won’t burn him, of course, but he flinches back anyway.

  
“It’s time to be the angel you were made to be, Aziraphale,” Gabriel says, but his voice is mocking. “There’s a war on, you know.”

  
Aziraphale bites down the urge to say, oh really, I hadn’t noticed half our kind are gone and everything is on fire, and then Gabriel moves on down the line of principalities, issuing more weapons.

  
Outside, heaven is a battlefield.

  
The fallen have sacked the celestial kingdom, and killed scores of their former brethren. Their leader has been cast out, his wings severed, and his limp body tossed into the boiling pits of sulphur that are now the territory of hell. Of course they’re fighting desperately, they have nothing left to lose.

  
Aziraphale grips the sword so hard his fingernails cut into the skin of his palms, and glimmering angelic blood stains the sword’s hilt, but at least it’s better than the shaking.

Did the war last hours or millennia? He’s never quite sure, sometimes it seems like a brief flicker of screaming angels and howling fallen, and other times his memories of it are of an eternity of the flaming sword in his hand, raised against barely visible shapes in an endless fire flickering ash stained nightmare.

  
There are other memories too. Worse ones.

  
Later, he will say he’s never killed, and he’s not sure if that’s a lie or not. They didn’t kill the fallen - not on purpose anyway - but they did maim them, and throw them into hell, and he isn’t sure how that’s any better than killing. He tries not to think of holding another angel’s neck in one hand and the sword in the other, hacking at the angel’s wings so there’s no chance of escape.

  
After the war is finally over, he expects the sword will be recalled to heaven’s armoury.

  
But no order comes for the sword’s return, and it’s not like he has anywhere to keep it, angels don’t have personal rooms, so it becomes an irritating thing he has to lug around heaven. Sometimes he shoves it in his belt, sometimes he carries it gingerly under his arm. He never grips the hilt, never holds it aloft, he just drags it with him, quietly resentful.

  
Finally he gets his new orders. Down to Earth, to stand watch over the newest part of Her vision, the garden The Lord has decreed Her most wondrous creation yet, where Her beloved humans are to live forever and ever in perfect peace.  
He is to be the Guardian of the Eastern Gate. He is to bring the sword. His hands shake then, when he first steps onto the wall, verdant green to one side, the desert to the other, the sword back in his hand.

  
Tedium quickly sets in, however, especially as he’s not quite sure what he’s supposed to be guarding. Is it the gate, the garden, or the humans? Will the threat come from within or without? Is there actually a threat at all or is his role purely for show? And if it is for show, who is the audience? So far, the residents of the garden number four angels, two humans, and various animals. Very threatening animals, such as adorable little ducks.

  
As each of these questions arise in his head, Aziraphale sets them aside. It’s not his place to ask. It’s ineffable. It’s his job to guard, flaming sword gripped firmly in a hand that doesn’t shake.

  
It all goes wrong pretty quickly, of course, once Crawly shows up.

  
Aziraphale finds himself standing by the gate as Adam and Eve walk through, banished, never to return. Not guarding them or the garden, just watching, hopelessly.

  
He doesn’t let himself feel that it is an injustice.

  
But he has come to like them, so seeing them go is something of a blow. Eve has named all the animals, plants and stars, and Adam has invented a thing called “beer” which is quite pleasant. They laugh, a lot, which angels don’t. They sing, and at night, he can hear them telling each other stories. He really likes the stories. (He wishes, for the rest of time, that he’d written them down.)

  
Watching them walk into the desert, with their newfound knowledge and nothing else, he has a sudden thought.

  
“Wait!” he calls. Adam turns, hopeful, but it’s not re-admittance to the garden the angel can offer. “Take this,” Aziraphale says, instead, and extends the sword carefully towards the human.

  
Adam looks at the weapon. He knows now that the world is not this perfect and safe garden, but he’s still reluctant. Eve flashes Aziraphale a grateful smile, then tells Adam to take it. “The baby,” she says.

  
And so Aziraphale gives away the flaming sword, and in that moment, his hands don’t shake at all.

  
It’s not long after that Crawly slithers up.  
“Well, that went down like a lead balloon,” the demon says, chattily, and then asks what happened to the sword, and by then Aziraphale’s realised he may have made a rather enormous mistake. Crawly’s delighted, incredulous laugh when Aziraphale admits he gave it away is another clue. Demonic approval is not a good sign.

  
Still. He doesn’t regret it, exactly. (And it turns out he’s rather a fool for demonic approval.)

  
Truthfully, he thinks less and less about the sword as the years begin to pile up. He’s pretty good at not thinking. His is ability to compartmentalise, as a human might say, is probably the only thing that keeps him sane.

  
Angels aren’t supposed to go insane, but they’re also not supposed to eat sushi or drink wine or cry at the opera or fraternise with demons.

  
So, he doesn’t think about the sword, and his hands are as steady as anything else in the universe. Which is to say, not very, because the universe is allegedly made of vibrating strings.

  
Perhaps they do shake, sometimes, when he’s had too much to drink, and he thinks about his arrangement with Crowley being discovered, or when he contemplates the looming end of it all, and when he thinks about a war that will destroy everything he loves. And perhaps his hands shake most of all when he imagines what he will be called on to do in the next great battle. In his imagination, he sees himself hunting fallen angels across the blasted earth, fallen angels with golden eyes and blood-red hair.

When he picks up the sword again that day in Tadfield, (one last time, doesn’t matter what happens, there’s no way he will survive to hold the sword again), his hands are trembling so violently he thinks he won’t be able to keep hold of it, but somehow he does.

  
It’s when he raises it above his head and he sees the look in Crowley’s eyes that he nearly drops it, because he remembers that look, the fear, from that first war.

  
They can’t have met before, on the battlefield of heaven, could they? He would have known, wouldn’t he?

  
No, he’s sure of that, and yet that look on Crowley’s face almost undoes him. Aziraphale loves him and he was willing to kill a child to keep him - and the world - safe and the horror that Crowley thinks he might lift the sword against him is almost the thing that crushes Aziraphale entirely.

  
Not losing the bookshop. Not realizing that heaven is a shiny edifice of lies. Not his own defection, long time coming that it’s been.

  
No, it’s that Crowley is afraid. Afraid of him. Doesn’t trust him. Thinks Aziraphale would, in the end, betray him.

  
“Crowley! Do something! Or I’ll never speak to you again!” Aziraphale begs instead. It’s the stupidest thing he’s ever said, but somehow it works.

  
Crowley does more than just something, he freezes time (how a demon who isn’t even a duke of hell manages _that_ is a question for another time) and then Adam fixes everything.

  
And then, later, when they’re at the bus stop, waiting, Aziraphale gives the sword away one more time. He hands it over gratefully and reluctantly, because he knows now what the sword was, and is. A terrible, dark gift. Good intentions turned into humanity’s greatest evil.  
His hands don’t shake.

  
Crowley is there, as he was the first time Aziraphale gave the sword away.

  
This time, however, Aziraphale knows he’s done the right thing, and knows he is doing the right thing as he reaches out, steady and calm, and winds his fingers through Crowley’s.

  
The demon is smiling, once more delighted and incredulous, and Aziraphale smiles back.

  
And he hopes, and perhaps he even prays, that he will never see the sword ever again.

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted to the Whumptober 19 challenge on Tumblr for the prompt “shaky hands”. I’m @thevoidthestars on tumblr.  
Edited for typos only. Fuck you typos.


End file.
